<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html lang="en">
<head>

<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright (c) IBM Corporation and others 2000, 2005. This page is made available under license. For full details see the LEGAL in the documentation book that contains this page." >

   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<link REL="STYLESHEET" HREF="../../book.css" CHARSET="ISO-8859-1" TYPE="text/css">
   <title>Feature Archives</title>
</head>
<body>

<h1>
Feature Archives</h1>
<p>The feature packaging information is placed into a separate Java .jar.
Standard Java jar facilities are used for constructing feature archives.
Feature archives reference separately packaged plug-in archives (see next
section) and non-plug-in files.</p><p>Features are identified using a structured identifier based on the provider
internet domain name. For example, organization eclipse.org produces
feature org.eclipse.jdt. The character set used for feature identifiers
is as specified for plug-in identifiers (see <a href="plugin_manifest.html">Plug-in
Manifest</a>).</p>
<p>The recommended convention for naming the feature archives is
<br><tt>&lt;id&gt;_&lt;version&gt;.jar</tt> </p>
<p>Where <tt>&lt;id&gt;</tt> is the feature identifier and <tt>&lt;version&gt;</tt>
is the full version identifier contained in the respective feature.xml.
Note that this is a recommended convention that minimizes chance of collisions,
but is not required by the Eclipse architecture. For example, the following
are valid feature archive names</p>
<p><tt>org.eclipse.jdt_2.0.0.jar</tt>
<br><tt>org.eclipse.pde_2.0.jar</tt>
<br><tt>my_feature.jar</tt></p>
<p>Internally, each feature archive is packaged relative to its feature
directory (but not including the directory path element). The archive has
the following structure	</p>
<p><tt>feature.xml</tt>
<br><tt>feature&lt;_locale&gt;.properties (see "Translated Feature Information")</tt>
<br><tt>other feature files and subdirectories (TBD)</tt>
<br><tt>META-INF/</tt>
<br><tt>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Java jar manifest and security files</tt>
</p>
Note that feature archives do not contain their constituent plug-ins and fragments.


</body>
</html>
